this is elgar's one and maybe only well-known orchestral work, excepting maybe his cello concerto and to a much lesser degree his second symphony and violin concerto. elgar was an english composer from 1857-1934, and he wrote this piece in 1899, in his forties.
check out this epic handlebar mustache.
elgar considered himself a sort of outsider in the british music scene and we know he was heavily influenced by the music of continental europe. but, when we (performer musicians) think of elgar we can't help but think of quintessentially english music. probably like this image, his british identity has probably become bound with his compositional qualities in your mind already.
but lets put this aside for now.
nobody who has ever heard of this piece doesn't know that these initials refer to people who were important to elgar, and until recently we didn't even know about half of them. so now that we do know them (or so we think), it's of course one of the favorite guilty pleasures of program-music analysts/lovers to find which aspects of the personalities are reflected in the music.
Theme
usually themes require little explanation, but this is one of the most complex themes i have ever heard. not that it's really that harmonically or structurally complex, but the one quality of most themes i've heard is that it is memorable - an earworm, even - and singable. this is neither. it definitely took two or three play-throughs for me to even be able to hum the thing from memory, and even then it's not always clear what the "melody" of the theme is. so listen to the beginning a few times. of course, it's likely that you've hear this piece a few times already and so might already know what the theme sounds like, but i had never even listened to this piece until last week.
the story goes that elgar was improvising at the piano, and his wife enjoyed hearing this particular little bit of music, upon which he decided to improvise several variations about their mutual acquaintances.
the theme is sort of mournful, even a bit solemn. we begin with a sort of fragmented, breathy, off-beat G minor. this segues directly into a middle section which is a bit more lyrical, in G Major. then the g minor material comes back, fragmented as before. the ending chord is a G Major.
before the premiere elgar said something interesting: "The ‘Enigma’ I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played . . . So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas – eg Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse and Les sept Princesses – the chief character is never on stage."
these sentences have been discussed pretty much to death. but for me this explains the fragmentary nature of the theme itself. for him the theme existed somewhere else, and is never fully realized in the entire work. think of the theme as a sort of window, which is partially obscured and doesn't allow the entirety of the light behind to come through.
furthermore, contrary to what everyone thinks, the "enigma" refers to this obscured quality of the theme. NOT the initials!
i'm going to go on a small tangent. if this portrayal of the theme is right, then it definitely explains why the theme actually sounds like a variation. one can imagine a sort of pre-theme that IS singable. after a bit of experimentation i have a line that basically just follows what the bass line does.
(halfnotes to each note)
Bb C D Eb D C Bnat C C# D Eb C
B C D E D C B A
it's interesting that in this light the major section is pretty much an exact copy, harmonically, of the minor section, with the necessary changes to make it into a major.
i think the real theme would go something like: B a g C a D c bb A c Bb c d G a F eb d C eb...
etc
I. C.A.E. - l'istesso tempo
caroline alice elgar was his wife. wiki reports that the four note motif that opens the movement in the violins (A# B F# G, I think) is something elgar used to whistle when coming home to his wife. in rehearsal the conductor told us that his wife was a gentle, very domestic person, which is reflected in all this very understated variation except the outburst of passion that comes out of nowhere and lasts for all of two bars, not even given a proper cadence before shrinking back into its shell. presumably this was a portrayal of how elgar saw her.
II. H.D.S.-P. - Allegro
hew david stuart-powell, an amateur pianist. the highly chromatic toccata-like style of this variation makes it a nightmare for the orchestra. apparently this is a big travesty of the licks he used to warm up with on the piano before beginning to play. elgar wrote that it was chromatic to beyond stuart-powell's liking. he played a lot of chamber music with elgar.
III. R.B.T - Allegretto
richard baxter townshend receives the first "major" variation. he was the author of the "tenderfoot" series and also an amateur actor, and elgar liked how his usually low voice "flew off" into the soprano range when he was acting. i suppose you can hear this in the oboe, with the swells on higher notes, and the little interjections in the strings.
IV. W.M.B. - Allegro di molto
this exuberant, galloping variation belongs to william meath baker, who was "a country squire with an abrupt manner and a tendency to bang doors behind him when leaving a room." elgar wrote that he "expressed himself somewhat energetically."
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